You only need to succeed once against a company full of people if your job offer is enticing enough. We don't know how many people said "never mind" when asked to do weird tests.

The stupid thing is that that it's remarkably easy to sandbox and application these days. Sandboxie is free, though not guaranteed to work (but it may very well have done, or at least would have made the strange behaviour obvious) and Windows Pro has had a right-click menu option to run an executable in a sandbox for a while.

When I read the title, I initially thought it was about infection through IDE ("do you trust the authors of this project" is there for a very good reason and in the case of VS Code attackers can get code execution before the prompt through Git config trickery).

I'd be wary of executing a program, but I bet I would click the "sure enable code execution" button if a recruiter sent me a coding challenge in the form of an incomplete project with a Git repo. Especially if they could set up a remote interview process where they want to go through code live "to see how I approach problems".

Right nowt he attack is super basic, but it's not hard to make the initial infection harder to detect in time.